«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Conceptualizing Stupidity and Ignorance in Arabic Idioms m 173 n target construction” 1 , and, on the other hand, the conceptual structure of the im- ages on which most idioms are built. An attempt will be made as well to examine the connotations and pragmatic functions of this cluster of synonymous idioms. Despite the fact that idioms are multiword expressions, they are part of the lexicon of Arabic and form different groups based on paradigmatic relations be- tween themselves and other elements of the lexicon. Synonymy would seem to be more “wide-spread among phrasemes than among words” 2 , although this “claim would at least have to be tested by quantitative analyses of the frequency and distribution of words and phrasemes in different sections of the vocabulary” 3 , For the purposes of this study I use the definition of synonymy as expressed by Alan Cruse: Aword is said to be a synonym of another word in the same language if one or more of its senses bears a sufficiently close similarity to one or more of the senses of the other word. It should be noted that complete identity of meaning (absolute synonymy) is very rarely, if ever, encountered 4 . As for synonymy in the realm of phraseology, two or more expressions can be considered synonymous if, as T. Z. Cherdantseva puts it, their definitions overlap in meaning, although they may have a different im- agery base, different components and are used in different speech or discourse situations. The last feature is the most important when distinguishing between synonyms and quasi-synonyms 5 . The corpus of idioms presented here has been collected from different sources 6 and the expressions stem from different periods. For reasons of space 1 Feyaerts K. Metonymic Hierarchies: The Conceptualization of Stupidity in German Idi- omatic Expressions, in Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds.), Metonymy in Lan- guage and Thought. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1999. P. 310. 2 Proost K., Paradigmatic Relations of Phrasemes, in Harald Burger et.al. Phraseology: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Vol. 1, 110b. 3 Ibid, 112a. For further discussion of synonymy among phrasemes see the same article p. 110–12. 4 Cruse A. A Glossary of Semantics and Pragmatics. Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 2006. P. 176. 5 Cherdantseva T. Z. Mnogoznachnost’ i sinoniniia idiom. Izvestiia Akademii Nauk, Seria Literatury i Iazyka, 1998. V. 57, no.4:51a. 6 Al-Maydānī, Majma░ al-░amthāl, al-░Askarī, Jamharat al-░amthāl, Ḥ amza ibn al- Ḥ asan al-Isfahānī, Sawā░ir al-░amthāl ░alā ░af░al, al-Zamakhsharī, al-Mustaq ṣ ā fī ░amthāl al-░arab, Abu al-Ma ḥ āsin al-░Abdarī al-Shaybī, Timthāl al-░amthāl, Ahmad Taymūr, Kitāb al-kināyāt al-░āmmiyya, Luwīs Ma░lūf, al-Munjid; Sieny M. E., Hussein M. A., Al-Doush S. A. A. A Contextual Dictionary of Idioms, Mu ḥ ammad M. Dāwūd, Mu░jam al-ta░bīr